The SCOPES-DF team worked with educators from our Leadership Cohort, the Fab Foundation’s GE/BCL team, and a developing community of practice to create lessons for our Special Collection that are aligned with the rich design and cultural attributes of Marvel Studio’s “Black Panther” film. The Black Panther Collection represents a timely opportunity to broaden pathways to STEM education by providing inclusive learning experiences at the intersection of cultural expression and technology.

This intersection of cultural expression and technology heightened by mass media, provides a unique opportunity for personalized learning that is transdisciplinary and rooted in acknowledgement and celebration leading to confidence, self-efficacy, and collective advocacy.

This collection offers a specific call and invitation to youth of diverse backgrounds to digital fabrication, by acknowledging and celebrating the cultural attributes of the African diaspora, while leveraging the expertise of our community, which is concerned with developing curriculum that addresses learning standards while illuminating STEM learning as concretely as possible through digital fabrication tools and capabilities.

The Collection

Our goal is to have educators tap this collection, which includes Dora Milaje Tabi Boot, Wakandan Bling, and Celebrating Adinkra through Digital Fab. These lessons have been Fab tested to ensure that educators have access to quality content.

Wakanda is a fictional African nation that is made up of many tribes, each with its own cultural style and heritage. The Dora Milaje Tabi Boot and Wakandan Bling lessons cover the steps taken to simulate cultural designs and digitally fabricated items worn by characters/actors in the film. These lessons are inspired by Ruth Carter’s approach to costume design for “Black Panther”, which includes combining symbols and patterns from several African cultures. This includes the use of Adinkra, visual symbols that are used extensively in fabrics and pottery. Traditional Adinkra are made using woodcut sign writing, so we used a laser cutter and 3D printer to create symbols/objects and the designs were computer-generated.

Celebrating Adinkra through Digital Fab shows students how to create custom Adinkra symbols using low-tech art supplies and digital fabrication machines including a 3D printer and vinyl cutter. Students will design and model their symbols using the 3D modeling program, Tinkercad as well as, with help from their teacher, create their own 2D symbol to be made into a sticker.

Geometric Potential of the Adinkra Symbols

One of the things that most inspired us when encountering the Adinkra symbols was their geometric potential. The Dora Milje Tabi Boot and Wakandan Bling lessons include the exploration of free, online computer-based tools that use “heritage algorithms” to help students learn STEM principles as they simulate the cultural artifacts and develop their own 2D creations. This includes the use of an Adinkra CSDT (culturally situated design tool) that allows students to learn a simple programming language to simulate Adinkra shapes.

Another starting point is to think about how to take these two-dimensional shapes into three dimensions. From a digital fabricator’s point of view, these symbols contain a rich and varied geometry – a collection of symmetries, solids and voids (holes), and patterns – that could be further manipulated and transformed into artistic and functional material objects.

A good lesson to learn when working with digital fabrication tools and processes is identifying the materials you are working with and learning about the qualities it gives you to play with. From 2D outlines of the symbols one can laser cut the shapes and get the third dimension from the thickness of the materials, which is what we did with the Wakanda Bling earrings. We used 2D drawings to cut out shapes from ¼” thick acrylic, giving us a depth full of colored light and shadow.

With 3D printing one can further explore three dimensional geometric transformations of the Adinkra symbols. Take for example one of the symbols for Democracy, below. As a 2D figure this Democracy symbol can be described as diagonally aligned intersecting squares. However, what if these squares were cubes instead and what if the cubes were distributed at different heights?

Based on the 2D Adinkra symbol (for “Wakandan Bling”), we created a set of solid cubes in TinkerCAD, a free browser-based 3D modeling program. Then, we played with the alignment and distribution of the cubes by dragging them around in space and joining them together to form new solids. We discovered that we could create a set of these symbols, each one a different configuration of cubes in 3D space, but when viewed strictly from the top, they were all the same. Students can find out how many such variations can be made. Teachers and students can follow the lessons to learn how to use these tools/methods to make their projects.

With this special collection, the SCOPES-DF team took a culturally situated approach to computation and digital fabrication, which has great promise in future projects that seek to foster engagement and motivation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) for all students and especially students from groups that underrepresented in STEM fields.